Snacking Increases for Social Media Use

Call it “snacking” or “grazing” or whatever you will, but people are spending less time creating content and less time with “long” content than in 2009 we’re finding.

Our research into how much time people are spending in Social Media services comes from the aggregate of our research across multiple industry sectors. In all we looked at the average length of blog entries over the past year, volume of tweets of 1,800 users on Twitter, 500 on Plurk and 800 on Identi.ca. We also looked at number and length of comments on blogs, news stories and videos in YouTube over the same time frame.

While we’ve found that overall use of Social Media tools has increased across most services and channels, we also noted that people are shortening their “comments” on blogs and news stories by about 30% overall. Consistent with other research on Twitter only about 1% of the entire “Twitterverse” is active on a daily basis. Same runs for Plurk and Identi.ca.

As we look at these data sets, we surmise that people are hopping around a lot more and sharing “snips” and tidbits but not taking a lot of time to view/read the content. This follows that the Web is a constantly moving place. Unlike books, television shows and movies. There are an increasing number of services that want our involvement so we are becoming distracted and our attention increasingly divided. That means ever more fragmented and insular networks of online engagement.

We’re likely absorbing less and becoming increasingly “fluid” in how we work and play online. This also reflected in recent research into Twitter use where only about 20% of “tweets” get re-tweeted. Seems we’re all in a mad dash to get noticed. For marketers this presents a challenge in how you format and present content and the very nature of the content itself. Suffice to say, shorter is better.

(Author: G. Crouch)

Content Usage Differences in Social Media

So you’re 40 something and you’re a hobby photographer with a nice DSLR you paid some good money for. You understand f-stop and ISO isn’t just a quality control system. You upload and share your photo’s. Then chances are the 90% of you edit your photo’s on your PC/Mac and then upload them. But not too much editing. Or perhaps you’re 20 or under…you take photo’s like mad everywhere. But you’re more into friend and party photo’s and you prefer to add captions, change colours and do all kinds of funky things with an image – and you’ll do it in browser online.

Our research through over 200 reports now across a wide spectrum of industry sectors, shows that age groups engage with digital media very differently. If you’re a marketer reading this – listen up. An example to engage with the younger generations is giving them digital content they can manipulate. That’s been done, yes. Perhaps most famously with Jeep and it failed miserably. Still, opportunities exist.

Once you hit the 30+ crowd however, they are less likely to manipulate photo images, are more concsious of what they post and where. In fact, the 30+ crowd tends to be a bit snooty with their content. They have less comfort with some of the technologies and spend less time manipulating digital content. Our research shows that about 15% of an over 30 audience will take to manipulating content. Under 20? About 80% will tend to manipulate digital content.

Much of this is simply logical – the older the person the less technology they’ve interacted with and the less time they’ll spend to learn and manipulate.

Understanding how different generations prefer their content and manipulate it can be crucial to planning a campaign or developing the creative elements.

How Age Groups Use Social Media Differently

Over 30? Well, you prefer text-based content, you’re more likely to use Flickr and you’ll fuss over photo editing but rarely record, edit and upload a video. Under 30? You love video and if you’re female you’d prefer to edit photo’s than video.

These are just some of our findings into 2010 in our ongoing look at how we’re using Social Media channels and the technologies that product content. Remember, today, everyone is a producer.

Youth: This market, under 30, prefers video to photo’s, yet interestingly enough, women prefer to edit and then share photo’s whereas boys prefer to create, record, edit and share video content. Additionally, youth (under 30) are more likely to participate in marketing promotions that have some form of participation that includes ranking content, changing content or somehow manipulating outcomes.

Adults: Those of us over 30 (sadly I’m one), well, we like to mess with photo’s more than video and we are prolific when it comes to writing. In an analysis of blogs across North America (we sampled profiles indicating 30+ to over 40,000 blogs) we found that the +30 crowd actually reads, whereas the -30 crowd prefers to massage video and watch. Interesting hey?

Marketers…if you want to engage the under 30 market segment…give them something to do with your content. That’s what they’re interested in. Over 30…stop being boring, but we’ll share your content if it’s interesting. Boring content? Don’t waste your money. The Web really is about “action” and the moment you forget that, you lose.

Want more information? Give us a holler and we can let you know what’s happening by generations or age groups and we can slice it six ways from, well, boring old Sunday.

(Author: G. Crouch)

Blogs: The Boneyard of the Web?

Are blogs still relevant? Are they still popular or are they becoming a digital boneyard of text, left to the biting dry winds of the desert Web? We asked this a few months ago and decided to do a little research and see what we might find for answers. In short, blogs aren’t quite dead, but the halcyon days are gone.

In Atlantic Canada, England and the Northeastern U.S. of the 2,700 blogs we have in our system, only 23% are updated monthly and only 12% are updated more than once a month. That’s down overall about 54% over 2009. The pace of new blogs in the region has slowed a fair bit as well.

The worst decline has been in the business sector so far in 2010. For business blogs we also found only 11% actually updated their blog once a month. On average, a business would post an entry to their blog 3 times per year.

When we looked at the very small business (1-5 people) though, we found that 64% updated their blog more than once a month. These blogs tended to be highly specialized around the industry sector. That got us to wondering if any area of blogs was seeing any ongoing activity. So it was true.

Our research in that direction indicated that those who are more “specialized” in an industry sector such as consultants, advisors or specialty small businesses with a niche have active blogs with good inbound and outbound link densities ranking the blog and business higher in the search engines.

We also found that blogs by specialized businesses tended to push their content into platforms like LinkedIn, Plaxo and Facebook. When we looked at larger small businesses and enterprises in the region though, their blogs were often dusty, neglected and the content was sanitized with few links outbound.

In the consumer/netizen sector, we found that over 60% hadn’t updated their blog for five months on average. We suspect their activity has moved to channels like Facebook, Twitter and similar.

Blogs aren’t dead. Their use however, is changing. Even traffic to blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger are down over last year. The halcyon days of blogs are gone and they are being defined now. Content generation by users is shifting and becoming more fragmented.

(Author: G. Crouch)

Time + Profit: The Social Media Marketing Challenge

In business, we’ve heard this often enough: time is money. Which means time is profit. Add to that the business demand of sales now and results are everything and you have an immediate challenge for marketing through social media channels. The added challenge is that “speed to results” isn’t just a business demand. It’s reflected in politics today where long-term goals are for the next guy and short-term keeps politicians elected. Even health care systems in Western countries are more “emergency medicine” focused than they on are long-term issues.

This may in part be the reason so many larger brands engage in social media for campaigns, rather than the long haul. And why there is such heated and ongoing debate over metrics in social media engagement. Rarely do corporately driven efforts in social media pay off quickly. The return rather, is more “soft” for the most part and about a dialogue that is measured over time. Dialogue that develops “reputation” or carries the message over the longer term. Dell dove into Twitter and a year or so later reported $2 Million in revenue via this channel. Not bad, but for a large corporation like Dell, not great either.

Then there’s the whole angle of delivering better customer service through social media channels. Jury still seems to be out over successes versus failure or a viable solution here. Some pundits hailed the business version of the second coming with regard to social media and customer service. It is impossible to truly have a 1:1 engagement with clients on any scale with an enterprise of any significant size – A good blog post addresses this by Beth Harte at the Harte of Marketing.

In a world that is hyper-connected ever driving hyper-fast results, social media engagement is antithetical. Still worth the effort for brand engagement, reputation management and customer service, but companies, our research shows, would be better served by managing their expectation of an immediate return. Social media marketing is true to what marketing is – a strategic part of the revenue process, not tactical sales, or at least very rarely so.

(Author: G. Crouch)